“Points on a Line,” an exhibition of drawings and prints by Leigh Ann Beavers, will be on display Feb. 2 through April 29 in Sweet Briar College’s Babcock Gallery. Each of the 40 works in the show depict vines, thorns and other details of the common blackberry, rubus allegheniensis.

In her artist statement Beavers notes that every plant shares a basic structure, “but each is absolutely unique in its growth form, since the unit pieces can be combined in countless ways. This theme, repetition with variation, has anchored my work for decades.”

The exhibition includes Beavers’ “Rubus Observational Studies” series, 15 gouache, ink and gesso works meant to hang together. Others is the show were made with rubber relief stamps, which in turn were made from “vignettes” extracted from each work in the series. The stamps are combined with other material such as paints and collage, to make representations of the original blackberry plants.

The show also includes a floor-to-ceiling installation titled “Lines.”

Beavers, who teaches art at Washington and Lee University, chose blackberries because they are ubiquitous on her Rockbridge County farm.

“I wanted to choose a real — as in something I could hold, see, observe, know — subject matter that was close at hand and that interested me form-wise so that I could stay with it for a while,” she said.

“I intended this to be a long-term project that began with observation, involved extraction of information and then went from there. The exploration isn’t finished and the pieces that I’m showing are representative of the many directions I’ve gone in.”